Quitting

"If you have been so low down as nearly anyone can and that because of alcohol, then you have to ask yourself if you can live with that being who you have become!"

I think it was me who said it like that.

He asked why I don't drink any alcohol anymore?

So I just told it how it happened that I took that decisions to is a bit over one year now. In that your I've had one wee snaps in Macao and 3 limoncello so and one small glass of red wine. Yes, that's it.

What has changed?

First of all a higher sense of wellbeing and certainly more positive and also enthusiastic. I read someone else's reflection about two years without alcohol where he used the phrase: "not hating himself anymore". 

Maybe I can put my name under that as well. 

Like in hating oneself when you wake up late in the afternoon and your head feels like at the climax of a Brazilian carnival, and you conscience are gasping after clarification as to what happened last night and how did I get home and in bed?

A recipe for low self esteem.

Yes, I feel more confident about myself without the drink. I do accomplish more as I have more time to create. Do not feel so restless and longing to go and hang out at a bar somewhere to talk mans talk over a sneaky pint or 8 -clearly ending up talking shite- and do not feel that alcohol will me relax. 

It did make me relax. So much that the last night I had too much alcohol, I got so relaxed that I fell asleep somewhere in central district in Hong Kong. Asleep, is the nice way to put it. The correct term would be that I passed out. 

Not to mention what it does to your pocket, as in savings. Not that I really have counted it like that. I just know it as the coins last longer and the visit to the hole in the wall has become less frequent.

On holiday it is obvious. No lunch pint or two. No afternoon pint or three and nothing in the evening and into the night or early morning.

Now the early morning is a fresh head and positive energy. Some mornings even involves exercise now or creative time like writing or developing ideas for my work.

This could be a hard one to reveal or even fully accept, however, I feel that I have become more happy with my job and also better at it because it gets the whole concentration of what I am and can offer. 

Now that I'm not just counting down to Friday socials and cold beers.

And Saturday socials and cold expensive beers while watching football on small screens next to other bragging beer drinkers. Like the one I had become.

Now I feel sorry to think that I didn't really give a damn how my colleagues saw me. At socials I was mostly one of the last to leave, but for sure I wasn't the most sober. In fact I was never one of the most sober. Regrettably, I was rather the opposite.

Once at a Christmas party i'd been to a bar before the party and had some margaritas. Then I had wine at the party, a lot and can very faintly remember we all left for a music venue. 

Then a black hole. Some walking around in Wan Chai. A closed door to the MTR home. Some arguments with a taxi driver as I'd lost all my money. Somehow I got home very late -or early- and past out on the toilet. My poor wife had to get me to bed from there.

When I got to myself later in the day, I had to face a banging hangover and a life without my phone, which I had lost somehow somewhere.

Unfortunately this episode wasn't enough to get me to realise that I had to revise my own relation to alcohol, to give it a serious thought and probably better quit.

Still I thought I was in control and that a thing like that happens. 

And it does, if you let it.

Not only to me in the real world. And I if Harry Hole can manage, why shouldn't I?

One of my favourite fiction writers has this story about a policeman, Harry Hole. He also is a drinker. In the series of books he often excesses into the blurred delusional world of alcohol, when he gets frustrated with a case he is working on. I remember me being a bit annoyed with him when he time and time again, disappeared into the black whole of binge drinking. Then he quits, and begins his fight against the temptation. And I have always been so engaged as he fought temptations that I nearly clapped in my hands when he resisted. Why didn't I do that to myself when I went out.

Another inspiration was a young musician in Scotland in the summer of 2015. He was on stage at a music festival in a little town at the seaside and in between two music pieces he and his musical partner had a little dialog about drink and this guy just calmly and extremely confident stated that he hadn't had a drink for two years.

No drink for two years! Imagine that being stated in a wee town in Scotland. I found it very strong. But didn't think I would do that. (I probably didn't believe that I could). The entire room kinda went silent for some seconds, like anyone had that same thought. Like " probably I should do that too, but how?" That was one of those magic moments that happens sometimes in life where one statement just throws the a whole crowd of the rail.

Now I'm kind of half the way to that. And what's the verdict then?

After one year without drink, I am starting to believe I can realise some of the ideas I've had inside me for a long, long time. Ideas that has been pushed into a waiting position and categorised as : "I'll do that when I get the time". 

Probably it should have been : "I'll do that when I'm no longer at the pub".

What it was that finally made me do it?

A complete black out and more than 8 hours of memory loss. Was what finally put me over the edge of realisation. 8 hours in the darkest dungeons and nights in Hong Kong's Wan Chai and Central districts and I have not the slightest idea what I'd done and how I got to that place where I woke up in the early hours of Saturday morning. A hard awakening. As I woke up I was immediately aware of what devastating circumstances I'd brought my self into as someone had stolen my backpack that I had been stupid enough to bring on a night out.

And with that backpack, all my documents. ALL MY DOCUMENTS. Passport, Hong Kong ID card, bank card, keycard to my workplace, my phone, my iPod classic, an iPad and my reading glasses. Plus my sweaty and smelly sports clothes. Ha ha.

Everything- gone.

That was what I'd become. A black out middle aged out of his head drunk gweilo.

No way.